THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC; IN THE LAND OF THE BLIND CAUDILLO

By Mark Kurlansky; Mark Kurlansky, a writer based in Miami, is working on a book about the politics and social problems of the Caribbean.

Published: August 6, 1989

IN THE MIDDLE OF A VILLAGE OF brightly painted wooden huts a helicopter touches down and a small, elderly, blind man, smartly dressed in a gray suit and gray fedora, is carefully helped out and guided into a long, black Lincoln. The limousine, license plate 0-1, immediately speeds 100 yards to a roped-off area of freshly turned earth and neat new concrete houses. Here, the blind man is helped out once again, then is led to a table where peasants stand, waiting restlessly behind a line of pot-bellied officers, in uniforms draped with braids.

The master of ceremonies steps up to a microphone and begins to speak. These new housing units, he tells the peasants, have been constructed by ''El Presidente'' - not by the government, not by a ministry, but by ''El Presidente, Joaquin Balaguer.''

At this, Balaguer stands up, his finger tips feeling for the edge of the table to get his bearings, takes the keys that the general beside him places in his hand and presents them one by one to the peasants who step forward. Next, as the master of ceremonies announces that ''El Presidente Joaquin Balaguer will give the children bicycles and dolls!'' the children are led forward one by one and they dutifully give the President a kiss on his pale right cheek.

Then the President is put back in the limousine, rushed the few yards to the helicopter and thence to the ornate National Palace, in the center of Santo Domingo, where he will continue a tightly packed work schedule late into the night.

This scene, complete with dolls and bicycles, is replayed twice a week. When Balaguer returned to power in August 1986 (he was President from 1966 to 1978), he began inaugurating a government construction project every Saturday morning; then, as more projects came on line, Thursday mornings were added. Now, Tuesday mornings are sometimes needed as well.

By his own account, Balaguer is spending $26 million a month - some economists estimate as much as $40 million - on a building spree in which he personally hands out every contract, every dollar and every key. In this Caribbean nation that has known more violence than democracy, that has been invaded and occupied by United States troops twice in this century and shares a tense border with even less stable Haiti, Balaguer is hoping that construction will create enough jobs, generate enough growth and spread enough good will to stave off another crisis.

But it is not working. Though every rural hill and city block seems to have its construction site -monuments, schools, houses, offices, parks, a museum, an aquarium, even a model prison, all bearing signs crediting President Joaquin Balaguer -basic services, such as electricity and water, are steadily deteriorating. There are nightly blackouts across most of the country. The capital city of 1.3 million people seems to be regularly unplugged, plunged into eerie darkness and silence for hours at a time. While President Balaguer was explaining to me that this was the fault of the neglect of the last Government, the National Palace briefly blacked out, a fact he did not notice but which seemed to greatly embarrass his aides.

The problem is simple: the Government doesn't have the money to pay for its many construction projects, so it prints new money. Inflation, at a 6.3 percent annual rate in 1986, reached an unprecedented 58.9 percent last year, and many predict it will touch 70 percent this year. Peasants, workers and merchants have all seen the standard of living plummet. In 1986, a quarter of all Dominicans lived below the Government's absolute poverty line, according to Luis Julian Perez, Balaguer's former central bank director; today, as many as half of them do.

Many Dominicans believe the point of spontaneous combustion is close, and tens of thousands have left, most of them for the United States. As discontent grew last spring, union leaders said they were afraid to call a strike. ''People are very unhappy; we are not sure what they will do,'' said Nelsida Marmolejos, secretary general of the Majority Workers Union, a major left-leaning union. ''There are a lot of people who do not have food. We could call a 24-hour strike and there could be assaults, destruction, deaths. We don't want to experience what happened in Venezuela,'' where at least 250 people died during food riots last March. But late in June, in the most severe of a series of violent demonstrations, a general strike call by the major unions led to confrontations between young unemployed workers and the police in which at least four people died and hundreds were arrested.

Ironically, as the fear of political destabilization grows, many Dominicans are turning their eyes to the very man who has become a symbol of Dominican political instability - the enfant terrible of Dominican politics, an 80-year-old self-avowed Marxist and longtime personal friend of Fidel Castro, former President Juan Bosch.

Bosch - whose brief term as president in 1963 ended with the coup and civil war that set the stage for the American invasion in 1965 - has already announced his candidacy for the next quadrennial presidential election, next May. One private poll commissioned by a conservative business group showed Bosch 8 points ahead of Balaguer (who most insiders insist will run again, though he would be 86 on the completion of another term). That is not welcome news for businessmen or the extreme right-wing elements of the military. Nor is it welcomed by United States officials, who are worried by Bosch's Cuban ties and, despite their concerns over the state of the Dominican economy, still appear to back Balaguer, offering his Government an estimated $57 million in aid this year, according to an official in the United States Embassy in Santo Domingo.

SITTING BEHIND HIS LARGE, OR-nately carved wooden desk, Balaguer looks minuscule; but though old, frail and blind, he still has the air of an old-style caudillo as he orders around the fawning generals, the rough old-time colleagues with their wide-brimmed hats and .45 automatics, and the aides who scurry obsequiously around his office.

He is an aged workaholic who does not sleep and so nobody sleeps. With the city dark around it, the National Palace is ablaze with light until well past midnight, as aides run in with documents to be read to the leader and bored soldiers stroll about, their boots clip-clopping on the black-and-white tile floors.

Both the desk and the National Palace that houses it belonged to Balaguer's mentor, Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, who ruled this nation by whim for three decades, amassing a fortune for himself and his cronies and torturing and killing thousands who were in his way. Though the rococo palace, with its palm-lined arcades, its high, decorative ceilings and its outer pillars starting to mold, looks like the tropical remnant of some past century, it was actually built by Trujillo in 1944. Trujillo also believed in public building projects. Indeed, Balaguer, asked for the most important lesson he learned from his admired Generalissimo, replies without hesitation: ''Public administration.''

Like the Generalissimo, Balaguer continually reshuffles his subordinates to keep all power in his own hands. Also like Trujillo, he is an unabashed racist in a country whose population is predominantly of mixed blood; in a 1983 book, ''La Isla al Reves'' (The Island Inside Out), President Balaguer warned of the corrupting influence of intermarriage with blacks, whom he regards as morally and biologically inferior. ''The black,'' wrote the President, ''abandoned to his instincts and without the brake of a relatively elevated standard of living, impacts on reproduction in all countries, by multiplying with a rapidity which almost resembles plant species.''

Balaguer personally controls every peso his Government spends, meeting every afternoon with the budget director and every evening with the Secretary of Finance and other officials to go over the day's books. On Friday evenings, he meets with construction contractors. There is no bidding for multimillion-dollar contracts. El Presidente hands them out.

As though it will somehow defer his own mortality, he is out to change the face of the capital and the country, just as Trujillo did before him (though many of Trujillo's monuments were torn down after his death). The National Palace is surrounded by so much construction that it seems to be in the middle of a strip mine. Bulldozers are ploughing up dirt all around the palace, to make space for government buildings, office buildings, apartments and new streets.

The one old building that remains is a huge, dilapidated house cluttered with balustrades and balconies. Shacks made of cardboard and tin cover the roof and the balconies. Eighty-eight families -several residents assured me of this figure -squat in the house. Every room has been partitioned into smaller one-room enclaves, the ceramic tiles are worn through to the floor, the only electricity is stolen through exposed wires and the only water comes from an open pipe in the front. This was once the private mansion of Generalissimo Trujillo.

The residents of the Trujillo mansion, like many slum dwellers, pray that their building will be left standing. New housing is given only to those who already own a home. Squatters and renters must buy. And these people have no money.

Chief among Balaguer's priorities, however, is reshaping the capital city for the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing, in 1992. There will be a new museum, a lighthouse, a new suburb, all of it a monument to Columbus. Neither the President nor anyone in his Government will say how many millions are being spent.

THE TWO OLD ENEMIES, BOSCH AND BALA-guer, sometimes referred to in the Dominican press as ''the two caudillos,'' have been fighting so long that they would rather lose to each other than anyone else. They claim to be personal friends, speak well of each other and seem determined above all else to perpetuate their gerontocracy.

The 80-year-old Marxist and the 81-year-old rightist were born 30 miles apart in the fertile Cibao farm belt. They are both of Spanish blood, and pride themselves on being intellectuals and men of letters. Bosch has written 52 books, including social histories, two novels and numerous short stories. Balaguer has written 25 books, including several histories of literature and volumes of poetry in a lavish turn-of-the-century style.

As far as Bosch is concerned, he and Balaguer are the only candidates; he simply dismisses a number of promising politicians in their 50's as young upstarts: ''There are younger men who consider themselves politicians but are not politicians yet.''

Balaguer says of Bosch, ''He is well prepared, well organized, disciplined and he has made a lot of progress in recent years.'' He seemed even happy as he added, ''He got 300,000 votes in 1986, but this time he will do much better.''

Most analysts agree with that assessment. Bosch himself explains, ''The Government has made grave economic errors that have strongly affected the masses.'' We were sitting in the book-cluttered headquarters of his Dominican Liberation Party. Suddenly, he jumped up. ''You want to see?'' he asked.

Without waiting for an answer, the remarkably fit, white-haired man pulled on his suit coat, buttoned it and carefully ran his hands downward to smooth it. ''I'll show you how they live in the capital of the Dominican Republic,'' he said as he straightened his tie. Then he strode out of party headquarters and climbed into an air-conditioned Toyota as his driver, a bodyguard with an automatic weapon, and a reporter scrambled to keep up. In a minute, we were off.

As we drove through the Dominican capital, Bosch kept shouting in his strong, slightly cracking voice, ''You see, you see!'' poking me with one hand and angrily tapping on the window with the other to point out shacks and beggars on the street. Sometimes he threw open the car door to show me garbage in the gutters.

''Go slow,'' he shouted to his driver as the Toyota moved into a slum of brightly painted one-room shacks and garbage-strewn streets, ''I want him to see the dirt.'' Then, to me: ''There are people with no food, no clothes, no school.''

We got out and started walking, and immediately a crowd began to form, traffic stopped, people waved at him from the rooftops, young men started chanting: ''Juan Bosch, El Presidente.''

Bosch strolled through it all in his unwrinkled suit like a decorous old gentleman showing a guest around the neighborhood. ''Look, look, this is a house!'' he said, pointing at a one-room shack. Suddenly, with a deep groan of rusted hinges, the weathered wooden door swung open and a large black woman with her hair in bubblegum-pink curlers raised a triumphant fist and with a joyous smile shouted, ''El Presidente!''

Bosch did not react, just pointed past her into the dark room and, switching from Spanish to English, said, ''This is a house. See how she lives.''

JUAN BOSCH IS A REFORMER. BUT he also makes it clear that returning to the National Palace at age 81 would be a sweet vindication. ''It is not a personal goal,'' he says. ''It is a question of history.''

Trujillo came to power in 1930 and declared himself Generalissimo, and for the next 30 years Balaguer worked for him and Bosch worked to overthrow him. After Trujillo's assassination, in 1961, Balaguer, who by then was serving as a figurehead President, was sent into exile and, in 1963, Juan Bosch became the Dominican Republic's first democratically elected President. Seven months later, his leftist Government was overthrown by a military coup and a civil war followed. After troops favoring Bosch had scored some important victories, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent in the Marines, ostensibly to protect American lives in the country.

After the Marines had restored order, a new election brought Balaguer to the presidency, which he retained for 12 years. Today, those years are remembered for strong economic growth and ruthless repression in which hundreds of political opponents were killed. When Balaguer was finally voted out of power, in 1978, he responded by sending troops to seize the ballot boxes. But President Jim my Carter warned that the United States would not support an unlawful Dominican regime, and Balaguer backed down.

Antonio Guzman of the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD), who defeated Balaguer and his Social Christian Reformist Party, could have become the first Dominican President to enter and leave the National Palace democratically, but, mysteriously, he killed himself shortly before he was to step down. He left that distinction to his successor, Salvador Jorge Blanco, also of the PRD, who nonetheless is not quite an ideal symbol of democracy: he is awaiting trial on corruption charges.

Balaguer, almost unique among stalwarts of the Trujillo Government, has never acquired any wealth. He lives in his sister's large house, which is decorated with such memorabilia as a portrait of Spain's Generalissimo Francisco Franco. His one valuable possession was a 30,000-volume library, which he donated last month to a Dominican university. He has never married, and his friends describe him as a loner. ''In the years that I have known him,'' said Rafael Bello Andino, who has worked closely with Balaguer since 1956, ''he has never engaged in any form of amusement.''

His blindness was a slowly degenerating process, and even his closest aides are not sure when he lost all sight. He first confirmed the fact publicly during the 1986 campaign, curtly dismissing questions about his ability to rule. ''As President I will not be asked to thread needles,'' he said.

The President obtains written information by having staff members read to him. In the case of important documents, according to a long-time friend and associate, Marino Vinicio Castillo, he will have two or even three different people read them to make sure he is being given an accurate version. He is said never to forget anything he is told, and he quickly memorizes speeches of an hour or more, including numerous economic statistics.

Though Bosch seems in far better health, his election would pose a dangerous test for Dominican democracy. He insists on articulating a complex ideology that terrifies rightists, particularly rightist military officers. He calls himself ''a Marxist non-Communist'' - that is to say, he believes in the Marxist analysis of history as a class struggle but rejects the centralized Communist state.

Such intellectual distinctions seem lost on his critics. Asked who he would support in 1990, one influential businessman snapped: ''I don't want Bosch. We have to be careful, we private-sector-minded people. We hear this Marxist. I see totalitarianism. We know about totalitarianism in the Dominican Republic.''

B UT THE MAIN CON-cerns of most Dominicans are not ideological. The Government estimates that only half of the population eats an adequate diet or has access to safe drinking water. In this nation of octogenarian leaders, the overall average life expectancy is 62 years, less for rural people. As much as 30 percent of the population can not read or write. A quarter of the people who want to work can not find jobs, according to official figures.

The urban poor have traditionally supported Bosch; Balaguer's strength has been the peasants. In 1986, starving peasants said they would be able to eat again only if Balaguer got back into power. But today, Bosch is their new savior, and the favorite topic of conversation in the little open-air bars along rural dirt roads is inflation.

Fautu Moran, 38, owner of a small plot of land in the Cibao, said his workers were all switching from Balaguer to Bosch. He said he used to pay field workers eight pesos a day. ''They bought rice for 45 centavos a pound and they could eat well. Now, rice is 1.8 pesos. I am paying them twice as much, 15 pesos a day, and they still can not buy enough to eat.''

The Government controls the price of rice and other basics, such as beans, bananas and cornmeal, and its willingness to maintain these prices is one of the most volatile issues. (In April 1984, large riots were sparked by Jorge Blanco's announcement of price increases on food staples.) But in a country in which almost everything is made with at least some imported equipment or components, it is difficult to maintain prices when the value of the currency is plunging almost daily. When Balaguer came to power, a United States dollar cost less than four pesos; today, it costs more than six.

The price of rice was recently inched up after careful negotiations with farmers, who need imported fertilizer for their crops. But the Government did not dare to raise prices to reflect the full 60 percent that the peso decline has raised fertilizer costs, and farmers say they can not make a sufficient profit.

Union leaders are also caught in the price squeeze. Wage rises, by fueling inflation, only further erode workers' spending power. ''People don't have money, but you can't ask for more money; that's dangerous,'' said Marmolejos, the Majority Workers Union leader.

But a principal source of inflation remains the Government, which, with its $26 million-a-month construction bill, continues to spend more money than it takes in, and prints the difference. (According to one foreign economist, the country's money supply has doubled since Balaguer's return to power.) The Government's budget deficit is equivalent to 8 percent of the nation's gross national product.

Balaguer is trying to raise more money by increasing taxes on multinational companies and on domestic businesses, but this risks alienating affluent supporters. Increased immigration to the United States offers another possibility. According to Finance Secretary Roberto Martinez's estimate, Dominicans in the United States (mainly in New York City) send back between $600 million and $800 million to their relatives every year, a river of cash that is now the Dominican Republic's second-largest source of foreign exchange.

But printing money remains Balaguer's chief means of financing his spending spree. The conventional way to confront this economic hemorrhage is to borrow the money from the International Monetary Fund. But to get an I.M.F. loan, Balaguer would have to agree to an austerity program that would curtail his ability to spend money. He would have to halt not only his construction program but the price subsidies as well.

The Venezuelan riots in March have helped bolster his anti-I.M.F. position. ''We have to maintain political stability,'' said Balaguer. ''Venezuela signed with the fund and it caused a social explosion.''

''He is incredible,'' moaned Andres Dauhajre Jr., executive director of the Economy and Development Foundation, a group of young, pro-free-market economists, adding, ''It is just a very old-fashioned position.''

The building program is under increasing criticism not only because it is inflationary but because it has done little for the country's basic infrastructure and income-producing sectors. Even in the President's inner circle there is discontentment with the program. In November 1987, Balaguer's central bank director, Luis Julian Perez, an arch-conservative and longtime Balaguer backer, resigned in frustration. ''The political point of view is that it is better to show some pharoanic works like the Columbus Lighthouse,'' he said. ''I don't believe in that kind of project.''

Although a wealthy landowner and fierce anti-Communist, Julian is concerned that the gap between rich and poor may become too great for the poor to tolerate: ''The rich man is becoming an insult to the poor man. They do not have money to eat, and that is explosive. We are facing a catastrophe.''

Balaguer claims he is preventing that catastrophe by creating jobs in (Continued on Page 43) construction, about 120,000 so far. But unions complain that they are jobs with substandard pay, and that once the Government stops building they will vanish.

Jose Francisco Pena Gomez, a popular former PRD politician, was asked where he would prefer to see the money invested. Without a second's hesitation, Pena Gomez fired off his list: ''Industry, agriculture, education, environment, reforestation, electricity, drinking water. . . .'' He continued for more than a minute.

Pena Gomez, 52, who recently started his own party after losing a leadership fight within the PRD, may be the only other politician besides the two caudillos with a broad popular base of support. But Pena Gomez is a black man in a nation that has never been comfortable about its mixed blood. People of mixed race must have their passports marked ''Indian,'' and even Trujillo wore make-up to disguise his somewhat dark skin color. Dominicans don't say they wouldn't vote for Pena Gomez because he is black. Instead, they say, ''He is too emotional'' or ''too excitable.'' Some even say that the country would be overrun by Haitians, a chronic Dominican fear, if Pena Gomez were President.

The other possible candidate is Jacobo Majluta Azar, now leading what remains of the split PRD, who lost to Balaguer by only 40,000 votes in 1986. His party is well organized and he is admired by businessmen. But he has little popular following, and in a party torn by the Jorge Blanco corruption scandal, Majluta has a reputation, never proved, of using public office to become wealthy.

Unless some movement soon forms behind Majluta or Pena Gomez, the country's future is likely to remain in the hands of one of the two caudillos. I asked Balaguer what his response was to those who say that he and Bosch are too old to be President.

Something mischievous seemed to almost twinkle in his cloudy, unfocused eyes. A faint chuckle was heard. ''They are right,'' he said with his faint, scratchy voice. ''We are too old.'' A slight smile formed. El Presidente, a tiny old man barely visible behind Trujillo's massive carved desk, was laughing.